4 Steps For Selecting The Right Software For Your Business

4 Steps For Selecting The Right Software For Your Business

Choosing software for your business can be exciting, but it can be extremely stressful if you don’t really know what you need. There are a lot of options to choose from and selecting the right one that fits your needs might take a lot of both time and effort.

Unfortunately, too many businesses lack the better judgement to find the right software and have made the costly mistake of selecting or developing the wrong kind. They end up spending thousands of pounds and wasting hundreds of hours for essentially nothing.

To ensure you don’t end up like them, here are four steps you can follow to pick the right software to satisfy your business needs.

Step 1. Understand what your company is about

The first step towards finding the right software isn’t about looking at your options. Instead, it’s to properly understanding what your company is all about. 

At this stage, you need to document (or at least take note of) everything about your business, from its daily operations to its products and services. The goal is to create a complete picture of your company, as doing so is extremely important for the next step.

Step 2. List the challenges you are facing

Once you fully understand the ins and outs of your business, it’s time to list the problems you’re facing. For instance, you might be having trouble with slow inventory management, for which you need an inventory tracking solution. Another example is keeping up with quoting and invoicing, which can effectively be solved with software as well.

In a sense, these challenges represent your needs. By understanding what these issues are, you can find the right solutions to help you perform better.

Step 3. Rank your challenges by importance

Once you have a list of problems written down, you should start ranking them by their importance or urgency.

Doing so is important because if you’re currently facing a lot of challenges, it might not be possible for any software to address all of them. In other words, you should separate your problems into “needs urgent fixing” and “currently manageable.” Find the software that addresses the top ranked problems, then move on to the next if you have resources left over.

Step 4. Speak to the professionals

There are many ways you can reach professionals from different industries, such as using social media platforms (like LinkedIn) to ask for recommendations. For example, if you’re looking for a general inventory system, you can ask anyone with expertise on the topic. However, if you are looking for more specialised software, it helps to ask someone familiar with your type of business.

Find out what software they have used to improve their operations, as well as the challenges they faced and the results of the changes they made. Hearing their input might help you re-evaluate your prospective solutions and possibly find better alternatives.

Conclusion

With all the information you’ve gathered from these steps, it’s time to look at the software available online. Remember, what you pick must address your problems that “need urgent fixing.”

Once you find several software options that are of interest to you, go ahead and look at the features, pricing, and the feedback from previous users. By doing so, you give yourself the best chances of finding the perfect business software solution to boost your productivity and growth!

If you’re looking for cloud-based procurement software for your business, oboloo is here to offer precisely what you need. Our procurement software comes with useful features like contract and supplier management. Get in touch with us today and learn more about what it can do.